Subscribe to this blog

Follow by Email

Search This Blog

Bureaucracy is not just hard to spell.

It is hard to manage, hard to work for, and harder to avoid. Large and medium businesses, and government organizations of almost any size are rife with this sometimes necessary evil. So it is worth asking why a free-market capitalist or a libertarian might think government should be diminished if not demolished, but corporations and their ilk should be allowed free reign and expected to work towards the most efficient and common good.

Ideals are fine, even when wrongheaded, but they need to be tempered by reality; they need to be held by people who can work within reason and be open to compromise. This is not just true of economics, but all political and social policy. Compromise is the way politics works over time. Even members of the US House of Representatives have to work with people who don't agree with them every now and then. This is something the Bush administration is just waking up to.

It is this fact, the very actuality of which often keeps our more dedicated right and left wing friends well near the fringe, which fuels the belief among radicals and reactionaries that the two major political parties of the USA are far too similar and might as well be one and the same. So much the worse for those who cannot compromise if they are right. Let the Libertarians, the Communists, the Socialists, and even the Greens marginalize themselves while they pine away for their various ideas of Utopia. The real world still spins, and the rest of us have to deal with it, if only in some very indirect manner.

Anybody who's ever run up against the bureaucracy inherent to both private and public organizations of any size should realize this, given a little tangential thought.

Get link

Facebook

Twitter

Pinterest

Google+

Email

Other Apps

Labels

Comments

Sorry to get specific here, this post deserves more, but I think it's important to note that Bush had the luxury of working with a bipartisan legislature in Texas, plus he held a relatively weak office, so his aactions at the time were to simply demagogue and threaten, then accept what was done. That has served him poorly.

Not to say that this had been his only actions, but I think it does explain a lot about his actions and patterns whith domestic politics.

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

-Rick Santorum seems a somewhat likeable guy who believes several crazy, distasteful things. It may not be helpful to say his ideas are nuts, but it still is less useful to fashion him an evil man because his discriminatory views don't jive with the left, centre, or centre-right in America.

-Calling a person a 'front runner' before votes are counted is just plain wrong. Calling one a front-runner after some votes are counted is slightly misleading. The race isn't about who the media thinks is ahead, and it is only indirectly about who gets the most votes. What really matters is accruing the most delegates. In the race for a major party's nomination for POTUS, the guy with the most delegates-who-will-actually-vote-for-him-at-their-national-convention is ahead. If no delegates have been awarded, there isn't really a front-runner, no matter what polls might say.

-I doubt the primary process will hurt the eventual Republican nominee for POTUS all that much.…

The world around us is in no way required to conform to our expectations, beliefs, or desires. Rather, it is all but guaranteed to disappoint us, at least once or twice a lifetime. The loftier (or more deeply felt) our ideals, the more this may be true.

When we accept this incongruity and are keenly aware of it, but cannot change our thinking, absurdity steps in. The world no longer quite makes sense. It is untethered from rational or moral concerns, adrift in a bizarre joke told by no one.
Desire for normative order is often irrational and misplaced. Placing ethical constraints on amoral matters makes no sense. Yet these appear (sometimes, seemingly) inescapable conclusions. Hence the sensation of absurdity.

We can apply these incongruous demands to anything and anyone. But this is not a universal philosophy. It is a philosophy of the self, a diagnosis.